Are you asking me to critique this excerpt? I would've excerpted:
"Western Europeans seem to be suffering a crisis of confidence. Election results, whether in North Rhine-Westphalia or across France and the Netherlands, reveal electorates who have lost faith in their leaders, who are anxious about declining quality of life, who feel extraordinarily vulnerable to foreign competition - from the Chinese, the Americans, the Turks, even the Polish plumbers.
Anybody who has lived in Europe knows how delicious European life can be. But it is not the absolute standard of living that determines a people's morale, but the momentum. It is happier to live in a poor country that is moving forward - where expectations are high - than it is to live in an affluent country that is looking back.
Right now, Europeans seem to look to the future with more fear than hope. As Anatole Kaletsky noted in The Times of London, in continental Europe "unemployment has been stuck between 8 and 11 percent since 1991 and growth has reached 3 percent only once in those 14 years."
The Western European standard of living is about a third lower than the American standard of living, and it's sliding. European output per capita is less than that of 46 of the 50 American states and about on par with Arkansas."
The first two paragraphs are typical of self-conscious mainstream media writers -- apologizing for how humble and self-effacing they are. Just get out of the way. Beginning where I have, it becomes a totally coherent short piece -- without telling us more about the author than we want to know. What's his point?
Otherwise, typical New York Times columnists drone on and on in the manner of the first two paragraphs endlessly, playing hide and seek with the only two-five paragraphs worth communicating. One of the things one will note about good blogging is that it runs about 5-10 paragraphs -- and if they can't say something in that space, they probably have nothing to say.
Repeat the first two paragraphs of development and you'll note nothing by shameless self-indulgence.
Not quite. The last time time we had a dialogue, you wrote I defended Times OpEd columnists like I was a member of their staff. I replied that Brooks and Tierney are the only ones that I regularly post. BTW, what do I have to defend here?
You criticize their expected format in which they are typically expected to draw a conclusion, state the reasons for making that conclusion, and then make a recommendation to correct the situation in approximately 750 words of standard spacing. What are their regular OpEd columnists supposed to do, quit their job to start a blog when they have families to support?